


To the Engraver of My Skin

by toujourspret (beaubete)



Category: Code Geass
Genre: M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-02 08:17:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19195123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/toujourspret
Summary: Soulmates doesn't always mean fated.  How true can love be when you have no choice?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The name comes from an anon on my tumblr; they suggested it as part of a meme about the fic I'd write for a suggested title, and I was still kicking the idea for this fic around in my head. It was suddenly impossible to think that the title could be for anything but this fic.
> 
> Soulmates fic, with a Geass twist. Or Geass fic with a soulmates twist. Whichever works.

“I had a mark once,” she tells him, that strange witch from Shinjuku, and Lelouch’s cheeks go pink.  You aren’t supposed to talk about them; marks are supposed to be private, more private than even your body—but she’s been shameless, here in his rooms, walking after her showers in just her towel, lounging on his bed in nothing but one of his shirts.  She’s—

“Liar.  There’s not a spot on you.”  There isn’t. He’s had plenty of chances to see.  Her smile at that is small, amused.

“Had, I said.”

It doesn’t make sense.  A mark—it’s meant to follow you through your lives, sometimes the only way to find your other half.  But when he looks at her eyes, so sad and still and hollow, he believes her.

::

It came up along the line of his ribs, and for every summer since he’s hid inside, reading.  Playing chess. Euphie and Nunnally, splashing each other in the pool set up in the garden for them; he’d smiled.  Turned back to his book.

And then it hadn’t mattered—there was no one there to see.

::

He doesn’t understand the word that’s shouted at him as he reaches with fascination toward the covered trough of water.  What he does understand is the brick wall that slams into him; he hits the ground and skids, and for one long, embarrassing moment he has to bite his lip because he isn’t going to _cry_ , not in front of this boy who’s towering over him, mean written all over his features.

“Lelouch?”  Nunnally’s voice, quiet and unsure, is the only thing that keeps him from running.  He scoffs, makes a show of rubbing the blood from his bitten lip with the back of his hand and ignoring the rivulets trailing down from scuffed and bloody knees to stain his socks.  He kneels, catching Nunnally’s arms to loop them around his neck as he hikes her up. She’s small but deceptively heavy; there’s a twinge in his knee, in his ankle, that wasn’t there before.  His first step wobbles. Nunnally’s arms tighten around him.

“What, are you stupid?” the boy asks.  His accent is thick enough that Lelouch sneers at him, but it isn’t like he speaks any Japanese.  It isn’t until he strides over and starts to pull on Nunnally’s arms that Lelouch gets it.

“No!  Hey, no!”

“Lulu?”

But there’s no way to grab her when he locks his arms around her middle; he can’t carry her like this, but it’s enough to stalemate.  He locks his knees until he isn’t swaying anymore, and Nunnally whimpers against his neck.

“Huh.  Okay.” It’s an unusually graceful concession from the boy who was trying to steal his little sister from him not a moment ago.  Lelouch is cocky for a moment, at least until his knee buckles beneath him and he and Nunnally go toppling to the stones. He’s at least careful to tuck her in, catching the worst of his on his back, but his breath is knocked out of him.  His chest jerks on the sob as he smothers it, eyes and knees and back stinging. Lets Nunnally cry for him, her face scrunched in the fear and pain that he can’t let himself voice.

“It’s okay, Nunnally,” he tells her, and his voice is scratchy but she quiets.  “I’m sorry I dropped you.”

“Let me carry her.”  It isn’t a question. The boy looks stern, _I told you_ written on his face as he reaches down.  She moves into the boy’s grasp easily, faithfully, and Lelouch’s heart thumps in his throat until she’s settled like a frog on the boy’s back.  “You’re really light,” he tells her, and she laughs.

His name is Suzaku.  Lelouch serves him hot water from chipped teacups and listens to him bragging—he’s the son of the prime minister, he is the heir of the shrine, he is Todoh-sensei’s best pupil, he is perfect and everything in his life is perfect, except for the orphans living in his garden shed.  Lelouch is quiet as Suzaku describes the field of sunflowers he prefers to play in.

“I want to see them,” Nunnally sighs with longing.  Suzaku’s eyes dart to her, lingering on her closed lids.  For a long moment, Lelouch wonders what Suzaku will say, stares him down with eyes like needles.  

“Ah,” Suzaku says, and his eyes turn to catch Lelouch’s.  “It’s not time for them yet. In the spring, I’ll carry you.”

“We won’t be here in the spring,” Lelouch tells him.  “Our father will come for us soon.”

It’s the first lie he ever tells Suzaku.

::

The curly characters are familiar, some matching though he can’t find the first part, and he realizes he may find his mark among them--that his mark is Japanese.  For a long moment he’s tempted to ask, to trace the mark in the dirt with the stick he’s using to practice as Suzaku teaches him simple words and phrases. They can hold almost an entire conversation now, Nunnally chiming in where she can, though he knows Suzaku humors him a little.  The difference between what he hears around him and the slow, patient way Suzaku speaks with them is stark, and Lelouch frowns to himself, doubling down on the symbols he’s learning. He’s nearly perfected the twisting tail at the bottom of ‘ne’.

“Good, good!” Suzaku encourages, “—but.”  He takes the stick, turns the tail the other direction.  Lelouch frowns deeper, concentrating. This time the loop feeds into the tail easily, and he sits back, quietly pleased.  It does look better. “It’s good, your ‘ne’,” Suzaku says, or perhaps just “It’s good, huh?” It’s difficult to tell, but the key words are clear, and Lelouch smiles at him.

“Suzaku.”  Tohdoh is a quiet man, but there’s a tension to him; Lelouch doesn’t recognize all of the words he’s using as Suzaku bows his head meekly, but he does recognize “time”.  He recognizes “useless”. He watches Suzaku’s bowed and humble head and the pink flush that covers his face; whether Suzaku thinks he does understand or not, it’s clearly embarrassing that it’s being said in front of him.  About him, Lelouch suspects.

“Ah, I have training.  I forgot,” Suzaku tells him under Tohdoh’s watchful eye.  These words are clumsy; he could have said it in a different way—he’d learned “forgot” the other day.  Lelouch nods. The characters disappear as he squiggles them out with a stick. By the time he’s done, they’ve both disappeared.

He still doesn’t know what it means.

::

Later, when he has more important things to worry about, the word still draws him to a dead stop, printed clearly in red and white.  It’s. His fingers drift toward the mark, stopped only by Nunnally’s leg where it dangles as she clings to his back.

“Lulu?” she asks, and.  And he knows he can’t — here, not now, not when the evacuation point is still some miles ahead and there’s still daylight.  He shakes his head, smiles though she can’t see it.

Suzaku’s fingers are careful around Nunnally’s leg as he guides her down.  He crouches, catching her on his back smoothly, and when Lelouch opens his mouth to protest, he smiles, too, shaking his head.  “Stay strong. I’ll help.” It’s. Kind, in the face of the danger they’re in. In the face of the fact that they’ve been staggering through burned and decimated villages, through corpses whose faces are already black with flies.  Strong—of course Suzaku is, when his own father’s been dead for less than a week and Lelouch’s father has set his life on fire. Lelouch nods once, sharply, and Suzaku’s smile goes softer. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m not!” he snaps back, but when he scrubs at his eyes with the back of a fist, they’re wet.

::

“Lulu.”  It’s quiet, just the two of them for once.  Nunnally is inside the dirty, unkempt plastic pod the administrators are calling a bathroom; it’s too small for him to come and help, and so he’s waiting here with Suzaku and hoping she doesn’t have an accident.  He’s listening for her call that she’s done, and it might be the only reason he looks up to see—Suzaku’s pulled the edge of his pants down, just enough to show the neat, foreign words on his skin. Lelouch’s heart thumps in his chest as he grabs at him, yanking on his shirt until the dark marks are covered, hidden.  Secret.

“What are you doing?” he hisses, and Suzaku frowns.

“I don’t know what it means.  I—before—can you tell me?” And Lelouch goes pink because he’s had the same thought, considered asking the same favor before he’d come to his senses and realized that it wasn’t a thing for showing.  And here was Suzaku standing outside by the toilets—!

“Lulu?” Nunnally calls, echoey and plastic; Lelouch just shakes his head and turns.  He’s got more important things to worry about. He helps her from the seat, cups her hands beneath the tap and pumps water into them for her, checks discreetly—no trouble, and his heart pangs for a moment that she’d managed on her own, as if she didn’t need him.

It isn’t until later, after the camp food dinner and tucking Nunnally into her cot next to his that he takes a moment to consider the dark words.  He knows how special it is to have a mark, how only about a third of the population do. His mother had had a mark, one that didn’t match his father; it isn’t uncommon with so few marks around for people to pair off in unmatched sets, and it wasn’t like his father had really paired off, anyway—quintupled off, perhaps, or sextupled off, but the thought makes him feel uneasy.

The whole point is to find that other mark.  It isn’t uncommon, no, but it’s rare for it to be permanent.  The story is that your half will always pull you, that the closer you are to them by proximity the stronger the heartsong connecting you will be, the harder it will be to resist the call of their soul to yours.  Things happen—perhaps his mother’s pair had died young in this life; perhaps they’d been injured or sent to the other side of the world. It isn’t impossible to resist, not if you get far enough away, but Lelouch presses his hand against his chest and tries to imagine a life that empty, always comparing his partner to the quiet knowledge that somewhere in the world was the soul who would always understand him best.  He can’t.

He knows how special it is.  It’s why he loops his fingers through Suzaku’s in the empty space between their cots, why he murmurs into the dark: “I don’t want to be here.”  He remembers them, those words, remembers the moment his eyes had locked onto the furious faces of two children as he’d panted, exhausted, Nunnally’s weight like stone on his back.  He’d thought he was talking to himself at the time.

Apparently not.

“That’s what it means,” he finishes, and in the dark, Suzaku smiles.  Somewhere on the other side of the room, someone shifts on a squeaky cot.  Someone coughs.

“Thank you.”

It isn’t the same.  It isn’t quite the same, telling him what it means instead of what it sounds like.  Lelouch presses his fingers over the characters along his ribs and remembers a sign, red and white.  Remembers the cool peace of shadowed water and the wooden dipper he’d wanted to show Nunnally.

Something inside him knows, and that’s what Mother had always said, her eyes bright and blue and soft with some secret memory.  “You’ll know,” she’d whispered, her hand warm along his side and her perfume around him as she’d bent to kiss his forehead. She’d known, almost the minute the mark had risen to the surface, because she was his mother and she knew everything.  Her fingertips had rested against the inside of a gloved wrist, and he still recalls her distant look, her quiet sigh. “You will. Your heart will not keep it secret from you.”

It’s comforting, this feeling that he’s wrapped up in love, in eventual, inevitable, ineffable love.  He curls his fingertips around Suzaku’s and sleeps.


	2. Chapter 2

“When your mark was erased, did it show up on someone else?”

There’s only one reason he’d ask, and they both know what it is.  She shakes her head, sad. “No.”

“Is,” he asks then, “Is that how there are blank people, then?  Were we all once—?”

“No.”

His breath escapes him in a rush.  A decision, then—it would be a decision.  A choice to give up a gift from the gods. He’d take away his matching mark and leave—a blank behind.  “I don’t—” It’s a decision that comes at the worst, most appropriate time, and still he can’t make it.  Thinks about—together—and still he can’t make it. “I don’t know. If I could.”

Her smile is sad, too.  “Not yet. I’ll ask again later.”

::

He’s forgotten how to live with people, nearly feral in their quiet little shack, just the three—two, Lelouch corrects himself, swallowing.  Just the two of them. Later, after, when he’s been brought back to civilization, he has to relearn privacy. The first time someone sees his mark, he plays it off as a temporary tattoo, grateful that there aren’t enough marked boys in his class for anyone to know better.  The second time, he walks into Milly’s grandfather’s office and peels up his shirt to expose the writing, fine and dark, on his skin. He walks out with a pass excusing him from communal showering; it isn’t enough, but no one calls him on it when he starts to skip gym altogether.  There is a lift in the clubhouse where they are staying that’s just large enough for Nunnally’s chair—they work with the cards that life has dealt them.

That’s just how it has to be—until the day it isn’t.  He staggers home reeking of blood and gunpowder, dizzy with grief and elation, and in the shower he scrubs himself until his skin is pink and smarting.  Suzaku—Suzaku was. Alive, until this afternoon; dead, because of him. Because of Clovis. Because of Britannia. It isn’t fair the way his skin still tingles with the memory of Suzaku’s touch, the way his heart still beats inside his chest when he wants it to stop.  He touches the words on his ribs and just wants it to stop.

And then.  And then.

He can barely hear the television over the sound of his own heart thrumming in his chest.  I told you, it whispers. Still alive, still alive, still alive. He tucks Nunnally into bed, tells her sweet reassurances—of course Suzaku would never have killed Clovis, never, when Lelouch still tastes copper and bile at the memory—and her smile is small but warm.  For himself, yes, but for her, too: he has to bring Suzaku back for her, too.

Like a dream, like a lucid nightmare, everything goes perfectly.  The mask is intimidating; he sees the fear on Bismark’s face and the hate on Jeremiah’s, but the cape is even better, wrapping Suzaku into a warm bubble beside him where the last few days and the bruises on Suzaku’s skin don’t matter.

He wants to touch him, to reassure himself that it’s not an elaborate joke; Suzaku lets him slide the tip of one finger along the line of his jaw, but when Lelouch lifts his thumb, drawn by the plushness of his lower lip, Suzaku snarls instead.  “Cut it out!”

“This isn’t what I want,” Lelouch murmurs back, because if they skate around it, this time Suzaku in English and Lelouch in Japanese—it’s foolish, he knows.  No recognition crosses Suzaku’s face. There’s more going on than that—and yet isn’t it at the base of it? The thought of letting Suzaku die for something he’d done was as abhorrent as the thought of Suzaku having done it in the first place.  Lelouch’s—Zero’s—glove creaks when he curls his fingers back, dropping the fist at his side before releasing it. “Join me. Please.”

It’s polite, possibly the most polite language that’s been used on Suzaku since he was the Prime Minister’s son.  The keigo takes him aback for a moment, but when he smiles, it’s wry. “You know the meaning of a word, don’t you?”  He laughs, short and sharp, and for one horrible moment Lelouch is suddenly sure, sure that Suzaku had understood him, that this was a deliberate rebuffing—“You shouldn’t use such words on me, Zero-sama.  I’m just a soldier.”

“You’re wrong!”  Panic is blooming hot and staticky in Lelouch’s chest, and Suzaku’s eyes are so, so verdant in the dark room.  There’s just the edge of understanding there, just the finest lip—“There’s no such thing as just a soldier!” The correction eases the breath back into his lungs, but Suzaku looks away, down at his feet.  “Perhaps to them—to Britannia—but not here. Not in my army.”

“Liar.”  Suzaku holds the word softly in his mouth, the way he’d hold a lover’s name.  When he glances up, his eyes are bright again. “There’s no army in the world like that, that won’t sacrifice its soldiers.  Do you think to weaken their strength by stealing away their stones before they notice?”

—Ah, go.  The rules—he has a vague memory, not enough to argue compellingly.  Still, “You destroy your potential by staying with Britannia.” Your pieces are wasted; come the end of the game, you will not have moved.  Lelouch tips his chin up, the motion bold and arrogant. If Suzaku wants—if he wants—

“I lead with an attack,” Suzaku says, and yes, because of course he does.  Lelouch could laugh if he didn’t feel like crying.

“Then you’ll be removed.  Such a waste.”

“I’ll change the course of the game.”

“You’re not allowed to move if it results in the loss of your own man,” Lelouch reminds him, and they could be ten again, arguing over the pieces on a board that Lelouch doesn’t totally understand.  Go was always a draw between them, Suzaku’s experience against Lelouch’s intuition drawing nil to each player. Suzaku laughs.

“Not allowed.”  It’s bitter. Lelouch wonders if he’s thinking of a friend—a childhood confidante, and all the wasted potential between them, the scent of it in the air—shot in a grimy warehouse in Shinjuku.

“Join me,” he asks again, “and make your move count for something.”

“It already does.”  Suzaku licks his lips.  “Your methods leave a bad taste in my mouth.”  It’s a waste. The corner of Lelouch’s mouth curls.

“Do you think I’ll fumble?” he asks.

“I think you already have.”

He watches Suzaku stand to leave.  “Where will you go, then?”

“My court martial starts in an hour.”

He can’t convince him to stay, can’t convince him not to go to the puppet theatre of a court, can’t convince him to embrace Zero—Lelouch.  His jaw clenches as he watches Suzaku go, at least until he’s ready to leave, himself. It takes some time.

::

CC is simultaneously the most frustrating person he has ever met and the only one he can trust fully, and when she shows up, hovering over his little sister like some kind of wraith, he wants to kill her.  She’s infuriating.

But.

But Suzaku is alive, and it’s more than anyone else has ever done for him.  Suzaku is alive, acquitted of Lelouch’s crimes, and. Standing in his classroom.  Thanks to her.

Lelouch’s breath catches in his throat at the sight of him, the simple black uniform crisp and precise and.  Flattering, he realizes with a startled flush. He looks healthy and alive and wonderful. He uses the signal; even if it doesn’t work, he still needs air, the pressure of his classmates’ hatred cloying and oppressive in the room and Suzaku so quiet.  Ashamed, of nothing more important or less in his grasp than his heritage; Lelouch’s fists clench as he looks over the campus.

Suzaku’s palm is warm on his shoulder, drawing him from contemplation.  He’d know it anywhere, but the rush of sensation in his chest when he finally, finally sees him—even without his mark, he’d know from the way his heart beats against the shell of his chest.  He tastes copper—he’s bitten his tongue—and smiles. “Suzaku.” He isn’t certain what to say until Suzaku’s own smile filters in and suddenly he’s biting back words at the dizzy joy within him.  “I’m so glad to see you. I thought—” He shakes his head, laughing at himself. It doesn’t matter what he’d thought, what he’d done, not when Suzaku is in front of him and it feels like his heart will leap through his ribs to meet its match.

Suzaku’s own smile is small, shy—he doesn’t—and Lelouch is absorbed by the burning of his skin at his ribs.  He’s never shown him, but minutes after discovering he’s not dead isn’t the time; on the rooftop of the school isn’t the place.  He takes Suzaku’s hand in his own instead. “I want you to come see Nunnally after school. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” Suzaku nods.  “That would be—” Lelouch’s heart floods at the thought.  It would be. Perfect.

He’s right, of course; the way Nunnally’s face lights up at the touch of Suzaku’s hand, the way Suzaku’s face melts in the warmth of her obvious joy.  Lelouch’s heart beats again, almost unfamiliar after so many years. He hadn’t understood it then, isn’t sure he understands it now. He finds words freezing on his lips before settling comfortably in his chest—he doesn’t need to say anything, just wrap himself up in the feeling,  It’s.

He’s fetching more tea when the other shoe drops.  CC, leaned against the kitchen sink; he’s glad he’s dismissed Sayoko for the evening, but still, it’s more risk than he wants.  “You shouldn’t be down here; you were supposed to stay in my room,” he tells her.

Her eyes are sharp.  “That soldier—” And then: “Ah.”

He’s pressed his fingertips against his ribs again, a tell that even she can understand.  “He’s.”

“You’ve got yourself a problem, don’t you?”

“I’ll handle it.”  She scoffs.

The peace is broken.  When he comes back to the table, Nunnally is yawning into her sleeves and Suzaku is quiet, though his eyes are soft in a way that makes Lelouch’s stomach twist.  “I’m sorry, Lulu,” Nunnally tells him, but.

“Nothing to be sorry about,” he tells her, gesturing for Suzaku to stay put as he wraps his hands around the handles of her chair.  “It’s late, and tomorrow is a school day. It’s okay; Suzaku is a student here now, so he’ll come visit you lots.”

“Ah—” Suzaku says, and it isn’t quite a denial, but Lelouch brushes by on his way to put Nunnally to bed.  It isn’t—he isn’t going to let reality ruin their perfect evening, for all that it has been insisting. He takes Nunnally through her routine, but she shushes him with a giggle when he starts to settle in with their usual recap of the day.

“Go.  You have a guest,” she tells him, and he muses over it on his way back down.

It’s disappointing to see Suzaku standing at the door, his schoolbag in hand.  He’s sure when he checks, the dishes will be drying in the sink; Suzaku has always been afraid of idle hands, but at least he’s waited to see him off.  Lelouch follows him onto the doorstep.

“I’m still with the army,” Suzaku tells him, voice quiet.  “I. Don’t think it would be a good idea for me to visit often, either, or for us to be seen together.  I wouldn’t be able to stand it if something were to happen because of me.”

Lelouch freezes, but when Suzaku turns to go, he finds the edge of his sleeve between his fingers somehow.  “Suzaku.”

Suzaku’s smile is thin, worn.  “Lelouch.”

“You still have an accent,” Lelouch tells him, because his mouth can’t connect, because he’s thinking of the marks on his ribs and on Suzaku’s hip, because if he turns his face down, parts his lips, he will be asking for—asking for.  Suzaku’s smile goes a little wider, a little more real.

“Do you still speak—”

“Yes.”  It’s firm; he cuts him off with words instead of his mouth.  Suzaku smiles again.

“Sleep well, then.”

In his bed, CC is lying on her back, his phone above her as she plays something that fills the little room with beeps.  If Nunnally weren’t asleep, if he weren’t so exhausted and heart-sick, he’d scold her. Instead, he just shoves her over with his hip, curls the blankets around himself.

“You’re softer, like this.  I think he makes you soft.”

He doesn’t answer.


End file.
